The Excommunicated Priest.
F. A. VAUDRAY, formerly pastor of a Roman Catholic church at Baton Rouge, preached in Calvary (Dr. Hemphill's) church in San Francisco on Sunday evening Jan. 26, his subject being the "Fate of the Excommunicated Priest." From the Chronicle we take the following extract:— "I appeal to the unanimous testimony of the theologians of Rome themselves to prove that the laws of the Roman Catholic church pronounce living imprisonment and torture upon the priest who leaves the church, and I challenge any intelligent Roman Catholic to deny that. Those laws have never been repealed—they have actually been enforced by the late pope Pius IX., and when king Victor Emmanuel took possession of Rome there were found in the dark crypts and subterranean cells of the Vatican rows of ghastly skeletons, to which still adhered the instruments of torture. These were the remains of those who had incurred the displeasure of the church, and who had been buried alive and left to perish in those terrible dungeons. I am stating facts of recent occurrence—facts which it is high treason for the American press to ignore—for they prove that the inquisition is not a thing of the past, but of the present, and that it flourished in this century, and that it would flourish to-day were the pope to recover his temporal power, for it is and ever has been an integral part of the Papal system. When you hear the Roman Catholic hierarchy of this country say that religious liberty is a plant of Catholic growth, tell them that their church has, indeed, nurtured that plant, but with the blood of millions of victims. To-day the Roman Catholic church has the will, but not the power, except in convents and monasteries, to stretch heretics on the rack or burn them at the stake. The punishment she metes out to the apostate priest is more terrible than any form of physical torture. It is murder long drawn out. She commands 200,000,000 devotees to hold him in abhorrence as a monster of wickedness. She teaches them that the priestly dignity which he relinquishes being greater than that of angels or archangels, so is his disgrace endless and his degradation complete. By means of those brotherhoods and sisterhoods, which she can at all times convert into the most powerful combination for the diffusion of calumny, she closes against the excommunicated priest all avenues of success. She turns the world into a vast pneumatic machine, into a vacuum from which she exhausts all the air and suffocates him. His friends regard him with aversion; those whom he loves turn from him with aversion; sister and brother turn from him with shame, and the father and mother, who so rejoiced and prided themselves on his elevation to the priesthood, gaze at him with horror and change their blessings to curses." The speaker asserted that hundreds of the highest and best of the Catholic clergy, disgusted with the mockeries of the confessional and the gross sensualities attending the institution of celibacy, would be only too glad to renounce their allegiance to the Romish faith, but lack the courage to face the terrible consequences.